Is Renewable Energy Still Just a Pipe Dream?
"Future technological innovations" are often touted as the solution to the relative cost-ineffectiveness implementation limitations of renewable energy sources in the present. However, beyond this description, such innovations become increasingly vague. Surely engineers in the energy business are working on something, but what exactly is below the radar of much of the American public. While some degree of futurism can be a good thing, we also want to be careful of straying into the realm of cold fusion, or artificial intelligence, or orbiting power generation platforms, or artificially intelligent orbiting platforms. To that end, what follows is a mentioning of some more modest possible future developments in the field of renewable energy, along with related quibbles and cautionary notes.
First up, Chinese developers unveiled a colossal, full-permanent magnetic levitation (maglev) wind turbine at the Wind Power Asia Exhibition held on June 28, 2006 in Beijing, as originally reported in Xinhua News. According to several English-language sources, such as the Worldwatch Institute's Blog, as well as Windtech International and Renewable Energy Access.com, the new turbines may boost energy generating capacity by as much as 20% over traditional wind turbines. This would effectively cut wind farm operational costs by up to 50%. I won't go into technical details here, especially since they are all but absent from the online news releases, but Jeremy Faludi at World Changing offers up an interesting bit of speculation as to possible designs using knowledge of current magnetic bearing designs. However, a word of caution is in order, as all current information on the turbines seems to be quite vague, and any pictures of the new devices are conspicuously absent.
Interestingly enough, another step in the same direction is, or was, being undertaken by an Arizona-based company called Maglev Wind Turbine Technologies (MWTT.) MWTT's proposal was to build single, colossal vertical-axis maglev turbines somewhat resembling large, multistory rotating buildings. The company initially claimed that one such turbine could provide power to over half a million people. However, the company has yet to build even a working prototype, and its once-informative website has seemingly gone underground recently. The company may be all but disbanded, and the only recent mention of it is in a Forbes.com news release announcing a new Chief Consulting Engineer.
On a somewhat more concrete note, in May, 2007 Scientific American ran an article on Carbon Nanotube Nets, a new form of "nanomaterial" which, it is promised, has the potential to spark new advances in flexible and/or transparent electronics. Most interesting to our topic was the mention of nanonets being used to build cheaper solar panels. One company conducting research in this area is Unidym, based in Menlo Park, California. Nanonet products still have a long way to go in terms of cost-effectiveness and efficiency, but the company asserts that it plans to bring nanonet-on-plastic films into commercial production in 2008.
Each new emerging technology or increase in efficiency in the field of renewable energy is cause for hope that we may one day be free of our present oil-regulated existence. Of course each new development also warrants caution, because while progress is being made all of the time, we also must acknowledge that each of these technologies has a long way to go before possibly being included as a significant portion of our energy policy. While we aren't likely to see dramatic change on this front in the next few years, or possibly even the next few decades, an unwillingness to invest the necessary time and resources into advancing these technologies in the present would assure our failure on the path to large-scale implementation of renewable energy alternatives more than any other factor.
First up, Chinese developers unveiled a colossal, full-permanent magnetic levitation (maglev) wind turbine at the Wind Power Asia Exhibition held on June 28, 2006 in Beijing, as originally reported in Xinhua News. According to several English-language sources, such as the Worldwatch Institute's Blog, as well as Windtech International and Renewable Energy Access.com, the new turbines may boost energy generating capacity by as much as 20% over traditional wind turbines. This would effectively cut wind farm operational costs by up to 50%. I won't go into technical details here, especially since they are all but absent from the online news releases, but Jeremy Faludi at World Changing offers up an interesting bit of speculation as to possible designs using knowledge of current magnetic bearing designs. However, a word of caution is in order, as all current information on the turbines seems to be quite vague, and any pictures of the new devices are conspicuously absent.
Interestingly enough, another step in the same direction is, or was, being undertaken by an Arizona-based company called Maglev Wind Turbine Technologies (MWTT.) MWTT's proposal was to build single, colossal vertical-axis maglev turbines somewhat resembling large, multistory rotating buildings. The company initially claimed that one such turbine could provide power to over half a million people. However, the company has yet to build even a working prototype, and its once-informative website has seemingly gone underground recently. The company may be all but disbanded, and the only recent mention of it is in a Forbes.com news release announcing a new Chief Consulting Engineer.
On a somewhat more concrete note, in May, 2007 Scientific American ran an article on Carbon Nanotube Nets, a new form of "nanomaterial" which, it is promised, has the potential to spark new advances in flexible and/or transparent electronics. Most interesting to our topic was the mention of nanonets being used to build cheaper solar panels. One company conducting research in this area is Unidym, based in Menlo Park, California. Nanonet products still have a long way to go in terms of cost-effectiveness and efficiency, but the company asserts that it plans to bring nanonet-on-plastic films into commercial production in 2008.
Each new emerging technology or increase in efficiency in the field of renewable energy is cause for hope that we may one day be free of our present oil-regulated existence. Of course each new development also warrants caution, because while progress is being made all of the time, we also must acknowledge that each of these technologies has a long way to go before possibly being included as a significant portion of our energy policy. While we aren't likely to see dramatic change on this front in the next few years, or possibly even the next few decades, an unwillingness to invest the necessary time and resources into advancing these technologies in the present would assure our failure on the path to large-scale implementation of renewable energy alternatives more than any other factor.
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